Overview

• Humanity crossed Earth Overshoot Day on 24 July 2025, exhausting the planet’s annual renewable resources and committing to live on ecological credit for the rest of the year.
• The Global Footprint Network calculates this date by comparing the world’s ecological footprint—covering food, timber, carbon sequestration and infrastructure—against Earth’s biocapacity.
• WWF and BUND highlight that Germany’s per-capita consumption would have placed its national Overshoot Day on 3 May and they are calling on the federal government to introduce binding resource-protection legislation.
• Analyses show that raising CO₂ prices to around €95 per tonne, boosting renewables to 75% of electricity generation and halving food waste could delay Earth Overshoot Day by weeks to months.
• Alternative studies dispute the validity of a single annual Overshoot Day, arguing that ecosystem pressures and resource use vary too widely for one fixed metric.